A Quantum Computer by Blasting It with the Fibonacci Sequence | Hacker News Reader

A Quantum Computer by Blasting It with the Fibonacci Sequence

gizmodo.com

Golden ratios are mathematically useful for non-interference. Phi (golden ratio) is sometimes referred to as the “most” irrational number.” Two waves with that ratio will never have their peaks and troughs line up. Ie, they don’t synchronize. Contrast that with a harmonic or integer ratio. Neuroscientists have found high and low theta waves (for instance) that are separated by a phi ratio — they propose that this ratio prevents interference and allows multiplexing.

Somehow, these pulses helped prevent coupling to the environment?

Similar to how primes show up in nature, e.g. cicada broods maturing at 11, 13, and 17 year cycles - they are less likely to compete with other broods this way, a natural optimization of avoidance.

Consecutive entries in the Fibonacci sequence have a ratio close to ϕ, and no common factors.

Non-biologist me suspects this is a case of 4n+1; an initial year, then an "emerge! fly away! party like it's spring break in Ft. Lauderdale!" signal with peaks every four years and the biggest peak during the 3rd (13 year) or 4th (17 year) cycle. (There are also two- to eight-year species, but I'm not finding any references to an 11-year species). Broods have stragglers that are usually off by 1- or 4-years from the main body. [1]

The benefit would be that above-ground predators are overwhelmed during mating season. [2] Since adults eat very little, almost all resource consumption occurs during the underground phase, when all species and broods are feeding at the same time. Since it's not a resource issue then there's no benefit to avoiding emergence in conjunction with another species or brood. Theoretically it would help overwhelm predators even more, but there's probably little practical benefit to 17x (one species) vs. 34x (two species). What you don't want is a different brood every year; that would eliminate the feast-or-famine problem for predators.

The timing between broods is just a random walk. Assuming stragglers are due to environmental or other non-genetic happenstance (4-year multiples are very strongly conserved), then if stagglers happen to survive one year their descendants would establish a new brood baselined 1- or 4-years offset from the original. Such straggling and establishing of new broods would obviously be very helpful in avoiding a species disaster during a bad year.

[1] https://cicadas.uconn.edu/stragglers/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada#Life_cycle (third paragraph)

My understanding is that predator-prey cycles are a sort of biological rhythmic entrainment. Oscillating in large primes makes it hard for predators to synchronize.

The Fibonacci sequence is characterized by satisfying the simplest recurrence relation, just as the exponential function is characterized by satisfying the simplest differential equation.

It's hard to think clearly about anything when there's enough cultural static in the way. Did you first learn of Bruce Springsteen after his Time and Newsweek covers? Here, Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Ratio enjoy a cult status that many including myself find repellent. To have original thoughts I want to avoid group think.

Nevertheless, Fibonacci numbers are like the prime "2". Life depends on properties of the element carbon, and other elements don't enjoy the same evolutionary success. I ask myself why a simple sensor pattern for digital photography that my father came up with half a century ago is still in use? The game "Core Wars" ended when a virus kept winning. Simplest answers often have an uncanny effectiveness.

Here, as an aging mathematician, I believe that this article could be reporting on an effect that's real.

Did gizmodo dumb this down so much it becomes impossible to understand?

Is it really the fibonacci sequence being a true missing link here? Or does the pattern just need to be pseudo random and/or increasing?

/edit

seems I read a bit too fast. They do explain why the Fibonacci word/sequence is better.

> You can think of the Fibonacci sequence laser pulses as two frequencies that never overlap. That makes the pulses a quasicrystal: a pattern that has order, but no periodicity.

I suspect it might have been the Fibonacci word (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_word).

The modified headline on here doesn't make any sense.

Also, this article doesn't seem amazing; it seems simplified to the point of being misleading, and it's not clear in the article what is meant by making it "work".

Original paper:

Dumitrescu, P. T., Bohnet, J. G., Gaebler, J. P., Hankin, A., Hayes, D., Kumar, A., Neyenhuis, B., Vasseur, R., & Potter, A. C. (2022). Dynamical topological phase realized in a trapped-ion quantum simulator. Nature, 607(7919), 463–467. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04853-4

Free copy: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09676v1 (the titles don't match exactly, but they are versions of the same paper).

Oh my, that’s a lot of mobile ads in your face while trying to read an inch of content. I don’t think I will be clicking mobile Gizmodo again.

What happened in the article though?

> but the team ended the experiment at the 5.5-second mark

why end it and not see how long it would last? and did they just do this once and call it a success? I'm no expert in this field by any means, but I just don't get this methodology. hopefully someone can enlighten me.

I took a look at the original paper. I think it follows from the fact that they experiment used 10 qubits, the tenth Fibonacci number is 55 (depending on how you count), and each "tick" in the experiment lasted 100 ms. Put those together and each experiment has to be exactly 5.5 seconds long. (They ran ~100 repeats per condition, plus 10,000 simulations).

I'm admittedly not 100% (Nature papers are terse and heard to read even in one's own field and this is far away from mine), but it makes a certain amount of sense.

Thanks for looking, that actually makes sense. Wish the article would add those details.

Mangled headline

Qantum grammar

Complexity creates stability.

So we live at the mercy of paradox.

Yeah, that sounds about right from my experiences.

Learn about atractors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com